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Comment by xchip | Hacker News Reader

"An acupuncturist in Palo Alto, Calif., thinks she has figured out why."

Acupuncture is know to work (even if you put the needles randomly) Please bring me a scientist :)

What the article describes is real science. That makes her a scientist. She's also does acupuncture, which makes her a pseudo-scientist. The two aren't mutually exclusive, and here is a person who is both. That's the real story, in my opinion.

To be a scientist you need to know how to research, thing that takes a minimum of 4 years with the supervision of a senior professor. Also your results need to be reviewed by other researchers... And even with all this process in place many times we make mistakes... so imagine what can I tell you about an acupunturist.

Cochrane reviews show that acupuncture works for some types of pain: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21359919

(It's not mentioned in the abstract I linked, but searching Cochrane's site shows that they look at studies comparing acupuncture to a "fake" acupuncture, which is presumably putting needles randomly.)

Well, that appears to be real science about acupuncture. Acupuncture isn't a science based not on whether it works or not (there appears to be some scientific evidence that it can), but rather because it is based on handed-down traditional knowledge and personal experience rather than empirical research.

That doesn't make it bad, it just makes it culture.

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